ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Interview & autobio

Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words.

The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, meditation (including process-relational analytic meditation, but much later than when he asks me about it), emptiness, subjectivity, Dzogchen, enlightenment, and ecological crisis, plus a host of thinkers from Whitehead and Peirce to Naess, Guattari, Harman, Zizek, Lacan, and meditation teacher Shinzen Young.

Writing, on the other hand, allows for the kind of reflective consideration of one’s words that I’m more accustomed to. The Pomegranate, a peer-reviewed journal of Pagan studies, has published a special issue incorporating autobiographies of some scholarly leaders within that field, and it turns out that I qualify among them. (I’ve been on the editorial board of the journal for many years.)

One of the things I discuss in my piece there is the “tension of the upper versus lower case “p”:

“Is P/paganism a religion among other religions, or is it something else, such as a sensibility, an approach to the world, a philosophical mindset, or even a way of conceiving of religion that is more encompassing than others? There is certainly value for Pagans to have their religious beliefs and practices recognized as such. But I believe there is also value in making a case for an earth-honoring spirituality that encompasses philosophy, science, artistic practice, and more, and that infuses many “religions” in diverse ways — something that they forget to their detriment. In this latter sense, paganism may be something to be rediscovered within the manifold practices by which humans experience value, agency, and mystery in (and beyond) the world around them.”

dmf – Yes, indeed… I read Hillman (and some of the other archetypalists and pagan Jungians) many years ago & drew on him a lot in my Master’s thesis. Also a little bit more recently (see pp. 308-9 here).

The Ballard interviews, taken together, are highly imaginative and creative exercises, as well as offering a kind of literary criticism. These dialogues also offer a very different—much more extensive and occasionally more revealing—portrait of the writer from Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, written in 2007 after Ballard was diagnosed with cancer and published in 2008, the year before he died.